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From the exhibition

Bringing Up Father — January 13, 1924

· Published January 13, 1924

Bringing Up Father — January 13, 1924
George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This full-color Sunday page follows Jiggs — the newly rich Irish-American bricklayer — sleepwalking out of the house while his imperious wife Maggie tries to manage the situation. McManus builds the gag across twelve panels with crisp Art Nouveau linework, decorative wallpapers, and expressive figure comedy: Jiggs in his nightshirt hailing a cab, Maggie discovering his empty wardrobe. Sunday pages like this one *were* the prototype for the comic book — same grid, same speech balloons, same recurring cast. Editors soon realized these color pages could be reprinted as standalone pamphlets, and by 1933 that insight produced the modern comic book format.

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